Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday March 23, 2011 @01:02PM
from the something-to-think-about dept.

An anonymous reader writes "37 lawsuits have been filed against Android in a little more than a year, the latest one of them being Microsoft's lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. ReadWriteWeb says 'the number of patent lawsuits related to the Android operating system is unprecedented' and shows an infographic that is also available on Twitpic and as a PDF file, on Scribd. The first two suits were filed in March 2010 by Apple and MobileMedia against HTC. The original source of the chart, the FOSS Patents blog, says that Android's market share is only one factor, other reasons being that Google's patent portfolio is 'far too weak for what's undertaken in connection with Android'; that Google doesn't do 'inbound licensing' from trolls; and that Google tends to ignore patent issues because Google itself is rarely sued: in most of these cases, Android device makers are under attack."

These are clearly scare tactics to try to curb the adoption of the platform. But will they succeed? Judging from how these types of things pan out with open source projects the answer is no, because there is little profit to be made. I say it is already too late to try and stop Android now.

Never has an operating system had so many challenges to its intellectual property in such a short time period as the Google operating system has had in the last year.

That's because an operating system never gained such popularity in such a short time period*. I expect if the number of patent lawsuits were charted against the number of users, we'd see that the ratio for Android would be normal (or less) compared to other operating systems. It's just that typically these things are spread out over several years, which is how long the OS takes to really become popular.

HTC included a number of their own components for interfacing to Microsoft desktop and server software in their Android devices. These components were implementing features that were present in HTC's older Windows Mobile devices. It is likely that Microsoft's patents were related to these, though because they settled we will never get to see the list of actual patents. With Barnes and Noble, they have gone after a tablet which has features that are quite likely not generic to Android. If Microsoft had any patents relating to Android itself, and it was acting in good faith, then it would be going after Google to get the problem sorted out quickly, not picking off targets at the periphery and using them for FUD value.